space program is responsible for vanishingly small share of co2. one launch is like a year of one car’s emissions.
robot missions are vastly cheaper and faster to execute than manned missions. we basically gained decades of verifiable scientific data than if we hadn’t sent robots.
we are better off with space jerkoffs, than say tallest building monstrosities, or biggest castle/palace, or biggest pile of gold from another continent.
although bezos has a giant clock company too. and musk has the tunnel thing.
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lol the rocket jerkoffs do those things too
C’mon. And this is just for the fuel from one launch - not everything else involved.
the total carbon footprint from the Kerosene and Oxygen is around 1115 Tones.
A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year .
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it’s possible figure i pulled didn’t mean the manned dragon launch, your numbers are certainly much higher. perhaps low orbit satellite launches. ETA: yeah i’m not sure how my number is sourced. lots of links to the ‘529 average citizens’ etc.
although even so, space program just doesn’t compare with the hundreds of million of vehicles on the roads.
I mean I am all good with taxing the shit out of billionaires but I also faintly remember that nobody had a problem with the vaccine makers getting rich when I brought up that topic in the Covid-thread few month ago.It’s either all or none and not just people we dont like.
Science that is far beyond the grasp of what most people know or ever considered learning seems to be inspiring more fear and disdain than awe. They put those emotions aside to obtain things like vaccines but they are not as likely to do that for nebulous future benefits of expensive space travel.
A better order of magnitude comparison is probably that the entire space industry emits about as much as a single airliner.
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They have before.
Vaccine makers literally saved the world. They are a special case. I don’t have any problem with them getting rich. WTF did Elon Musk do that makes him deserving to be a billionaire? Other than to have the luck to be in the right place at the right time and have a little bit of business acumen.
Well I could say he gave all other major automakers a reason to focus more on alternatives to the gasoline engine.
The big problem comes from treating people differently. That’s also a problem with UBI. People dont want rich people to get UBI as well but the law or constitution says that everyone is equal. I would have to check on it but I think there were several times that our supreme court struck down laws that violated that principle. Either we get over it or we will fight forever and get no progress ever.
I’m not going to do everyone’s homework for them. Some rough calculations and the emissions from fuel ONLY were about double for space launches in 2019 than for one average airliner. I expect an airliner’s emissions from fuel use per flight/total lifecycle emissions including all development and R&D and everything is so much better that you are off by more than an order of magnitude.
Satellites are clearly a benefit.
For now: No manned space exploration. No missions to Mars.
How much did this data cost?
What can we expect to get out of it that improves our lives?
We can still do that. There’s lots of science that can be done without sending giant rockets to Mars.
Lots of stuff itt strikes me very similar to the arguments that the US shouldn’t bother doing any kind of global humanitarian missions until literally every homeless person in the country has been helped. Forget that genocide, we have homeless American vets and we could just give them a million bucks instead!
Humanitarian missions generally involve humans lmk when any of those show up in space
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it varies a lot obviously. perseverance took $3b. it will produce data for years. most serious proposals for manned missions start at >$100b for the transport, and $230b total in 2035. mars one (a scam) claimed it could do it at $6b (lol).
the benefit we will all eventually reap will be much greater than the cost. perseverance mission itself probably employed thousands of people over ten years so it paid for that too, which is just like a form of a government job guarantee and publicly funded education for grad students etc. but even with that, it’s comparable with a project like a tunnel or a bridge, or 250 miles of highway, or several skyscrapers, or about half of yearly tax subsidies to each of the largest oil companies.
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